She drew and painted the pressed flowers that they had brought home in blotting paper; studied the skeletons of field-mice; reared a family of snails in a plant-pot, and kept a day to day record of their lives. And soon there was a pair of mice concealed in a box, and fed on milk and cracker crumbs after supper; and a rabbit which was supposed to live in a hutch in the back garden but which was generally stretched in civilized ease on the hearthrug, blinking at the fire; and bats, which hung upside-down in a parrot cage, and came zig-zagging across the room at dusk and settled on her fingers; and a hedgehog called Tiggy who drank out of a doll’s tea-cup and eventually sickened, and was buried with dreadful tears in the back garden.

‘It is all the same, drawing, painting, modelling, the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye. Why cannot one be content to look at it? I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever, and settles on the queerest thing, worse than queer sometimes. Last time, in the middle of September, I caught myself in the back yard making a careful and admiring copy of the swill bucket, and the laugh it gave me brought me round.’